In spite of the concerted press campaign to transform me into some upstart wordsmith who had inexplicably won the pools ('Osborne mellows now he's on £1,000 a week'), I was not earning great sums from any of the three plays now that tow of them had finished their Broadway runs.

The striving fluency of the Hampstead nanny's boy is deceptive and occasionally plausible. With its cultural allusions and cross-references to other disciplines, it is the gab-gift of someone to whom English is an adoptive tongue. Intellect does terrible things to the mind.

Villainy had a sense of wicked superiority about it and they had a sneaking feeling that sometimes old Robin was a bit too good to be true. Perhaps I already had a vague sense that courting and, what's more, achieving popularity was not a gift I possessed

Don't be afraid of being emotional. You won't die of it

Like all obsessive characters, Merrick was inordinately boring. He was uninterested in books, music, politics, people or, seemingly, even sex. His studied politeness was a mask that must conceal a slow-boiling malevolence. I can't see what he could have responded to in an irrepressible jokesmith like Jimmy Porter. He could squeeze out a frosty smile only when someone like a lovingly hated star collapsed with coronary.

Kelvinist and Calvinist, schoolgirlishly light-hearted, she stood out in Manhattan like a Welsh miner at a bar mitzvah.

I would always need a northern bite in my blood if I were to survive the writer's recurrent ailment: exhaustion. A jumbo Judy Garland at five in the morning would not ultimately nourish me as much as a plate of jellied eels in Margate. I felt a stabbing wave of homesickness.

Caution is evil medicine to me, even when it seems to guarantee reward. It was a foretaste of my later conviction that the follies which a man regrets most are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

Although at the age of twenty-eight I had become preposterously famous, I was still partially gagged by the indoctrination of aggrieved lower-middle-class humility. In my work I had not dissembled, I was sure of that, but the nagging inheritance of 'Who do you think you are?' is hard to drown out in the presence of those who seem to have an ironclad awareness of who they are.